NSA collected non-terrorism-related emails

The National Security Agency began improperly collecting Americans’ electronic communications that had no connection to terrorism in 2008, but the government didn’t learn of the problem until 2011, senior administration officials said Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper will release three documents that reveal the extent of the error, posting them on a new tumblr page.

Congress, the administration officials said, knew when it authorized the surveillance programs in 2008 that some Americans would inadvertently have their communications intercepted.

Lawmakers “clearly knew that there would be inadvertent collection of U.S. person communications,” an official said. “This is not a back door or a surprise. That is why they put in a requirement that there would be minimization procedures, because they knew that if you’re targeting foreign people, those foreign people are occasionally going to be in contact with U.S. people. So this is not some back door or anything.”

The problem began as soon as the program launched, officials said on a background conference call with reporters Wednesday. The NSA would collect broad batches of e-mails that were to, from or mentioned an e-mail address of a foreigner NSA was tracking. One official said the NSA would collect entire inbox screengrabs of emails even though the targeted e-mail address may have appeared in only one of the messages.

“For technological reasons, NSA was not capable of breaking those down, and still is not capable, of breaking those down into their individual components,” the official said. “So if you had a situation where one of those emails may have referenced your targeted email in the subject line, you’d nonetheless collect the whole inbox list. Its like a screenshot, you get whatever is popping up on your screen at the time.”

The NSA gathers the emails as part of a program known as upstream collection, which an official described as “communications that are transiting the Internet, as opposed to communications that collected at either end by the Internet service provider.”

Upstream collection amounts to about 10 percent of all electronic communications the NSA gathers under Section 702 of the Patriot Act, the official said.